Pottery (Civ6)
Wheat and Rice. |quote = No man ever wetted clay and left it, as if there would be bricks by chance and fortune. |quoted = Plutarch |quote1 = I thought clay must feel happy in the good potter's hand. |quoted1 = Janet Fitch }} Pottery is an Ancient Era technology in Civilization VI. Strategy Pottery is an important early step for civilization. The creation of containers out of clay ensures long-term, safe storage of food and other essentials. Through this technology, cities can build Granaries to improve sanitation and growth. It also permits Builders to harvest any Wheat or Rice in planned district spots. Pottery is one of the five possible techs you can choose at the very start of the game. And although it doesn't unlock any important improvement or district, it leads to the ubiquitous Writing, which unlocks the entire upper side of the tech tree, so you will need to research it eventually. But it also leads to Irrigation, which you will absolutely need if your starting location's Luxuries are predominantly plant-based (and thus accessible via Plantations), or if it is far from the sea, devoid of minerals and in general - poor on terrain-based sources. Otherwise, you should prefer some of the other starting techs, which unlock more immediate benefits. A possible exception to this though is if you are playing as a civilization that has inherent advantages in the area of research. Civilopedia entry “The art or craft of the potter, the skill of creating ceramic items” – in other words, making things out of mud. With pottery, objects (sometimes useful) are shaped out of clay and then placed in an oven and subjected to high temperatures. The resulting product is extremely brittle but is also airtight and more-or-less impervious to corrosion, oxidation, infestation, and other decay. The earliest pottery objects found include jugs and containers to hold liquid or grain. And some really ugly statuettes. The earliest known ceramics are the Gravettian culture figurines (little, faceless representations of fat women) that date back to between 29 and 25 thousand BC. These were shaped by hand, and fired in a pit. Somewhere around 12000 years ago, clever folk figured out that clay – often mixed with sand, grit, crushed shells, or bone – could be used to make more useful items: pots, cups, plates, bowls, storage jars, and so forth. In Japan, during the Jōmon period, potters began putting glaze on their earthenware pots. During this time several types of pottery were developed – earthenware, stoneware, and porcelain. Until the potter's wheel was invented in Mesopotamia sometime during the Ubaid period (6000-4000 BC), pots had to be shaped by hand ... a laborious process. Harnessing the wheel speeded pottery making. Until the Etruscans made use of molds to “mass produce” pots and other items in the 6th Century BC, a process “acquired” by the Romans when they swept away their bothersome neighbors. In China, meanwhile, the process of slipcasting – another way to mass-produce ceramic vessels – evolved during the T’ang dynasty. Then all these lovely ceramics got replaced by plastic...